Jamie Smart – Live The Life You Desire

Back in 1996, when I read my first book about NLP & Hypnosis, I had no idea of how my life would unfold. I was living in Oxfordshire, working as a project manager for a publishing company, and was making a decent living to support myself and my wife (we’d just married).
Slowly, I began to apply the principles I’d learned. Some things changed naturally in my life (I got a job working for a consultancy and moved to London), and I began to see results from using the hypnotic principles for communicating with others.

I was becoming more willing to engage with the adventure of my life. Let me explain. When I was working for the publishing company in the early 1990s:

• I was good at my job, and well-paid for it, but I didn’t feel fulfilled.
• I had a sense that there was something else I was supposed to be doing on this planet, but I had no idea what it was.
• To make matters worse, I didn’t actually believe that I could do anything else.
• I could see how other people could follow their dreams, change jobs, start businesses, change tracks, find new careers, become entrepreneurs, but I somehow knew I couldn’t.
• I didn’t have a clear direction for my life, but I wanted one.

In 1998, I attended my first NLP training. Two weeks later, I quit my job and set up my own business (still working as a consultant). I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew that NLP had something to do with it.

In the years that followed, I spent most of my time off (and a lot of my income) on finding the finest teachers of NLP and Hypnosis, and learning everything I could from them. I moved out of project management and into much more people-oriented work, and with each move, my overall sense of peace and fulfilment increased.

But I discovered something very strange.

I could get great results using NLP and hypnosis to help other people make changes and get what they wanted, but I had limited success using formal techniques to do work on myself. I got great value from the NLP approach to goal-setting, but it was almost as though something had been missed out of my NLP training. I felt like a page had been left out of the manual.

While I knew I was moving in the right direction, I still didn’t have the sort of peace, joy and happiness in my life that I knew was possible.

My frustration with this situation sent me outside of the field of NLP and hypnosis, to areas as diverse as homeopathy, quantum physics, provocative therapy, TFT, spirituality, yoga my search was extensive. And in the course of that search, I discovered some keys.

The keys to success

These keys were so powerful, that they opened the doors that had previously been closed to me. All of a sudden, the NLP techniques worked for me. Amazingly, these keys also massively increased the power of the work I did with other people. The funny thing is, many of them were almost like cliches that I’d heard over the years, but no-one had ever shown me a way to put them into practice. Once I was able to do this, some astonishing things happened:

• I began to spend more & more time in the present moment, and less time worrying about the future and the past.
• I let go of limiting patterns & behaviours. Problems I’d struggled with for years started to disappear effortlessly.
My direction and purpose in life have become clear (they didn’t arrive like a telegram, but rather emerged as I began to relax and let go).
• I was suddenly able to make sense of the results I’d been getting in my life, and make simple changes to start living the life I desired.
• I stopped worrying & started enjoying myself. When I think about the future today, it’s with a sense of excitement, anticipation, and enjoyment of the life I already have.
• I am being true to myself. My whole life people said to me Just be yourself, but no-one ever showed me how. Now I know.